In this article it is argued that it is not only globalization itself, which is generally recognized to be in a state of serious crisis but that the ideology used to ‘justify’ (supposedly objectively) neoliberal globalization seems also to be going through a parallel terminal crisis. It is shown that the cause of this crisis is that this ideology never passed the ‘reality test’, despite the strenuous efforts of the globalist ideologues. It was this recognition and the parallel success of neo-nationalist movements in attracting the masses of the working class victims of globalization from the globalist ‘Left’, which has led the latter to invent the myth of racism in order to smear the Brexit revolutions in UK, USA and beyond.

It is generally recognized today that globalization goes through its most serious crisis since it developed into the present New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization at the end of the 20th century, as even the flagship of globalist ‘Left’ admitted very recently reflecting the views of multinational corporations’ chief executives.[1] I am talking of course about neoliberal globalization because a capitalist globalization can only be neoliberal, as it implies open and ‘liberalized’ markets for capital, labor, goods and services—the infamous ‘four freedoms’ of the EU Maastricht Treaty. No wonder the globalist academics and politicians, i.e. all those taking globalization for granted, have been trying hard lately to counter the widespread and growing discontent against it, which has already taken the form of pure anger. This anger became plain as day in the Brexit revolution, as well as in the results of the US Presidential election, which established a pattern expected to be repeated shortly in the forthcoming elections in France, Italy and so on.

This pattern, as I described it in my latest book,[2] involves, in the first stage, the launching of a frontal attack by the transnational elites and the local elites associated with them against those questioning in any way the NWO and its institutions, such as the EU, using frequently the ‘fear weapon’ (aiming at the feeling of insecurity that any radical change inevitably generates to most people) but, also, pure lies and slanders about the supposed racist, if not ‘fascist’, nature of the anti-EU forces and so on. Then, a barrage of polls follows which, invariably, predict the defeat of the political forces questioning globalization. These predictions are not simply the result of data manipulation by the pollsters (who are usually funded by the economic and political elites with a clear interest in influencing voters) but may also express their inability to establish the voters’ true intentions —some of whom, clearly terrorized by the mass establishment campaign, hide their real intentions of voting. Finally, at the last stage, catharsis follows with the reversal of all expectations and the victory of the anti-establishment (i.e. the anti-NWO) forces.

The ideology of globalization vs. reality

The ideology of globalization, which is of course the dominant ideology today, is simply the set of ideas and beliefs which are used to ‘justify’ (supposedly objectively) neoliberal globalization in all its aspects, i.e. economic, political, cultural and so on. This is the ideology which one can easily find in the publications of the IMF, the World Bank etc., which is repeated ad nauseam by the establishment economists, politicians, academics (who brainwash accordingly their own students) and of course the mass media of the transnational and local elites that express the interests of the minority of the world population benefiting from neoliberal globalization. Inevitably, this ideology is increasingly resented today, either directly or indirectly, by the victims of globalization, i.e. the vast majority of the world population.

This ideology is usually presented under a pseudo-scientific cover, reflecting the dubious scientific nature of economics as such. This nature of economics became particularly evident in the latest two economic crises (in the late 1990s and, particularly, in 2008-9) which no economist has successfully predicted. This is of course something that reflects the fact that economics (and I am talking about both orthodox and Marxian economics) was never a science in the strict sense of the word as I have shown elsewhere[3] and most philosophers of science agree on this.

The basis of the ideology of globalization is that the opening and liberalization of markets, (or the removal, in IMF parlance, of ‘structural deficiencies’ or barriers), which are due to inflexibilities of the market mechanism and barriers to free competition, would boost competitiveness and therefore growth and employment. Such barriers that were mentioned in the Cecchini Report,[4] on which the official ideology of the single market for the EU rested, were the various physical, technical and fiscal barriers that were assumed to obstruct the flow of commodities, capital and labor. As regards to the capital market in particular, freeing this market from any controls, that is, the creation of conditions for the easy and unrestricted flow of capital between countries, was considered to be a basic requirement in this process. This is why the abolition of all foreign exchange controls has always been considered an essential condition for the `Single European Market’ of 1993.

However, the most important barriers were not the ones explicitly mentioned in the Report, but those implied by it and, in particular, the emphasis it placed on competition. These implied barriers were the ‘institutional’ barriers to free competition, which had been introduced by the social-democratic consensus (1945-1975) and which the agreement for the Single Market undertook to eliminate — a task brought to completion by the Maastricht treaty. Such institutional barriers were the Keynesian type of state interventionism to secure full employment and the large welfare state that created fiscal and therefore competitiveness problems, the labor unions’ restrictive practices’ and the nationalized industries, which did not always act on the basis of micro-economic criteria to raise economic efficiency.

Yet, the systematic removal of these ‘barriers’, that the opening and liberalization of markets entailed, far from boosting income and employment, it led to massive inequalities and chronic underemployment through the vast expansion of part time work, zero contract hours and so on. Furthermore, the opening and liberalization of markets has led to a tremendous concentration of economic power, which in the last two decades has taken the dimensions of hyper-globalization. A significant recent study[5] on globalization, among others, confirms the above trends. The main feature of this hyper-globalization has been the rise of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) that, by 2009, numbered more than 80,000, accounting for about two-thirds of world trade. However, hyper-globalization is beneficial only to small sections of the world population, whereas the vast majority of people are victims. This was the inevitable outcome of the opening and liberalization of markets that has led to a huge concentration of power in the hands of TNCs, as scientific studies, such as a 2011 study by the New Scientist, have established.[6] This study, using a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, identified 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. It revealed that, of these TNCs, just 1,318 core companies, through interlocking ownerships, own 80% of global revenues. Furthermore, they found that just 147 companies (i.e. less than 1 per cent of the network) form a ‘super entity’, controlling 40 per cent of the wealth of the entire network!

Furthermore, the supposed benefits of globalization to non-advanced capitalist countries such as China, India, Brazil etc. is in reality a myth. What happens is that TNCs are involved in a huge pursuit of the places all over the globe which secure the minimization of the cost of production in terms of labor cost in particular but also taxes and similar company costs. Multinationals are, rightly (from their own point of view), responding as quickly as possible to those new demands and, as a result, we are witnessing a level of international outsourcing that we could never have imagined. As it was observed by an expert on the field:

“‘Made in’ labels mean little nowadays: companies based in the west often have their production plants elsewhere and use components sourced from third countries; and are financed by investors in yet other countries. If that were not complex enough, when countries impose trade barriers and erect controls, companies simply move overnight. Regulators and governments often do not stand a chance.”[7]

So, in the NWO, it is no longer nation-states that rule the world, fighting among themselves for the division of world markets, but rather the transnational corporations. It is these huge oligopolies that are always the victors, irrespective of where they base their activities. Therefore, the fact that today China or India look like economic superpowers (or rising superpowers) is not, in effect, an economic miracle but rather an economic mirage. If any of these countries stopped offering the ‘comparative advantages’ they presently do, particularly in terms of cheap production cost they offer to the TNCs, then the economic miracle would end overnight — i.e. as soon as the TNCs move to one of the other countries begging them to invest in their own area.

The mechanism through which the real incomes of the victims of globalization have declined works through the lifting of any significant social controls on markets imposed in the past to protect society and environment from markets. The effective lifting of social controls aiming at the protection of society from the markets means that transnational corporations are today free to move capital and commodities all over the world, while having to face regulatory controls only. Furthermore, the ‘liberalization’ of labor markets, which is part of the same process, implies effectively the lifting of social controls to protect labor, for the sake of attracting foreign capital, (i.e. the transnational corporations), and making the economy more ‘competitive’. ‘Flexible’ labor is the norm in this process, i.e. a vast expansion of part-time or occasional labor, zero hours’ contracts etc. – all of which have the effect of artificially reducing the level of unemployment at the expense of real incomes, i.e. incomes which are essentially frozen in real terms.[8]

Furthermore, liberalization of labor markets meant also the opening of borders that facilitated the movement of labor, particularly among the EU countries, through the Lisbon and Schengen Treaties. The result of this was the present migration crisis in the EU that threatens its very foundations. The EU elites are of course in favor of labor market liberalization, so that real wages are suppressed in the EU area but the precondition for such a policy to be effective is that they would be in control of the labor flows. It is exactly the violation of this precondition that has created the present crisis.

Therefore, coming back to the economic ‘miracles’ of countries such as China and India, in fact, they are both characterized by hundreds of millions of starving people and just a few hundred billionaires, as well as a small (proportionately to their population), but utterly greedy, middle class. India, for instance is a country where Mercedes saw a 47% surge in sales recently and where its super-rich have long raised eyebrows around the world with their spectacular spending,[9] whereas at the same time nearly half of India’s 1.2 billion people have no toilets at home[10] and nearly 2 million children under the age of five die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhea, and of those who survive, half are stunted owing to a lack of nutrients.[11] Yet, the Indian elite recently decided that the country could afford to have its own space program and even launched the first satellites![12]

The myth, in particular, of the emerging new economic superpower in China is based on crude statistical indicators, such as GDP and the concentration of industrial and trade power within that country. But such indicators ignore the huge size of its population, and the fact that it is basically the TNCs which created the alleged economic miracle, including the post-Mao industrial and trade power. Thus, taking into account relative population sizes, the per capita GNP of China and India is still 11% and 3.5% respectively of that of the USA,[13] despite the fact that the celebrated growth rates achieved by both countries in the last decade were over six times higher in China and more than four times higher in India, than in the USA.[14] In other words, the so-called economic ‘miracles’ of globalization (China, India etc.) are, in fact, the myths of globalization, as their rapid growth and industrialization, in the last 35 years or so, simply mirrors the de-growth and de-industrialization of the West. It was from the West that many TNCs moved to China and India to maximize their profits, exploiting the huge comparative advantage of these countries in terms of cheap production cost (mainly cheap —and usually skilled —labor), as well as in terms of markets free of significant social controls, low taxes, and other facilities offered to investors, particularly in the ‘special economic zones’ of slave labor emerging lately in countries like China. Similarly, the allegation repeated by Obama and all globalist ideologues of the supposed drastic reduction of world poverty as a result of globalization can also be shown to be a statistical myth. The presumed “elimination” of poverty is almost exclusively due to the fact that the Chinese “communist” leadership removed from the list of the poor more than 400 million Chinese in the period 1981-2001, simply because they became proud earners of US$ 1 dollar a day, thus decreasing with one stroke of the pen the percentage of absolutely poor in China by two-thirds and reducing accordingly world poverty —something that every self-respecting ideologue of globalization celebrates![15]

As for the supposedly huge trade power of China, although this is prima facie true, many, if not most, of its high technology exports and imports are due to the activities of foreign TNCs. This means that the moment the country decides to impose drastic social controls on markets to reduce their ‘freedom’ to move capital and commodities in and out of their country, (e.g. in order to protect local labor or the environment from the wild exploitation of TNCs), the Chinese ‘miracle’ could end overnight.

Also, one can draw similar conclusions with regards to the other dimensions of transnational economic power, e.g. China’s technological power. As Wolf & Pilling pointed out in their study, a clear indication that China is still well behind is that “economy wide average productivity remains a fifth of US levels.”[16] Even more important is the absence of world-leading Chinese technology companies, as the same study shows, with the principal exception of Huawei, whereas the US by comparison, hosts a significant number of world-leading companies.

The consequences of globalization and the propaganda of the Transnational Elite

But let us see briefly how the globalization process has already led to an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth, which several studies have confirmed.

As regards to the concentration of income, according to Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz:

“Large segments of the population in advanced countries have not been doing well: in the US, the bottom 90% has endured income stagnation for a third of a century. Median income for full-time male workers is actually lower in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages are comparable to their level 60 years ago.”[17]

Also, as regards the concentration of wealth, according to a Credit Suisse report, the richest 1 percent on the planet owned 48.2 percent of the world’s wealth in 2014, (up from 46 percent the year before), whereas the bottom half of the global population owned less than 1 percent of the total wealth![18] Furthermore, more recent data suggests there has been an acceleration in the concentration of wealth. Thus, according to a very recent OXFAM report, the net worth of the 62 richest people is equal to the combined wealth of half the world (3.5 billion poorest people). Furthermore, as the same study showed, this trend has accelerated sharply, in the last five years or so, as the wealth of a circle of billionaires consisting of 388 people has risen by 44 per cent, (or half a trillion dollars) since 2010, while the wealth of the poorest fell by 41 per cent (more than a trillion)! [19]

The social consequences of the huge inequality created by globalization, even in the USA, the country that played a leading role in promoting the opening and liberalization of markets throughout the post-war period, are well known. Thus, a very recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association implicitly showed that the more a country is integrated into the NWO the greater the negative impact on health and life expectancy. The result is that, as average life expectancy in developing nations continues to rise, lifespans in parts of America are getting shorter. This has reached the point where the poorest American men, at the age of 40, have a life expectancy comparable to the average 40-year-old man in Pakistan and Sudan! Rightly, therefore, Dr Deaton, a professor of economics at Stanford University, noted that the “infamous 1 per cent is not only richer” they have “ten to 15 more years to enjoy their richly funded lives,” with their life expectancy being better than the average for any nation on earth.[20]

Even the Financial Times, the systemic financial organ of the Transnational Elite par excellence recently had to admit the catastrophic consequences of globalization. As one of its main commentators pointed out: “We are close to the point where globalization and membership of the Eurozone in particular have damaged not only certain groups in society but entire nations,” describing in some detail the economic shocks that ‘inevitably’ result from globalization.[21] The economic shocks concerned are: the stagnation of real average incomes for two decades but also the global financial crisis — a consequence of globalization — and its permanent impact on long-term economic growth. The overall effect, according to the same report (written just before Brexit!) was:

“In large parts of Europe, the combination of globalization and technical advance destroyed the old working class and is now challenging the skilled jobs of the lower middle class. So, voters’ insurrection is neither shocking nor irrational. Why should French voters cheer labor market reforms if it could result in the loss of their jobs, with no hope of a new one?… In 2014, almost 90 per cent of Germans were in favor of free trade, according to a YouGov poll. That has fallen to 56 per cent. The number of people who reject TTIP outright has risen from 25 per cent to 33 per cent over the same period of time.”[22]

No wonder that, following in particular the victory of Brexit and the fact that President Trump, during the election campaign, adopted many of the demands of the victims of globalization, the Transnational elites have been terrified by this rapid rise of the anti-globalization movement. Particularly so as it is not anymore just the neo-nationalist movements in East Europe (such as those in Hungary and Poland) which challenge globalization. Following Brexit, the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany party (AFD) came second, ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU, in regional elections held in September, while similar parties and movements in Italy, France, Austria and the Netherlands have also seen a significant rise in their popularity.

This could explain the concerted attack against the rising new anti-globalization movement by some of the prominent members of the Transnational elite, such as the head of the IMF, the president of the European Central Bank and the president of the European Council.[23] All of them suddenly discovered the gross inequality in the distribution of income and wealth as a result of globalization (followed belatedly by the globalists all over the world) — and blamed (not globalization itself, of course!) but just the political elites for not taking enough measures to boost support for low income workers and reducing inequality. Yet, all of them are fully aware of the fact that any such measures are impossible, in an environment of open and liberalized markets. This is because any such measures, if they are designed to be effective (as present circumstances demand), they are bound to affect negatively competitiveness —the foundation of globalization itself.

Not surprisingly, the arch-gatekeeper of globalization, the EU Commission President, immediately came out to ‘restore order’ and declare that the recipe for combating growing discontent in Europe was “more union” including a military headquarters “to co-ordinate efforts towards creating a common military force”. This rightly prompted Le Pen, the leader of the French FN, to ask “What is the EU protecting us from — are you protecting us against prosperity?”[24]

The myth of an implicit racism behind the Brexit revolutions of UK and USA

Finally, a particularly odious myth promoted by ideologists of globalization (and explicitly or implicitly by the globalist “Left”) is that both Brexit and Donald Trump were victorious mainly because of an implicit racism in both societies. The obvious intention of this kind of slander was to discard any idea that the Trump vote in the USA (or, similarly the Brexit vote in the UK) had anything to do with class and anti-globalization, and everything to do with racism and anti-immigration! Yet, even orthodox academics could not escape some indirect hints to the class nature of the vote, as when they mention the fact that “Donald Trump was remarkably successful in such mid-West Rust Belt states as Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, where the decline of manufacturing industry has seemingly created a part of America that can also be said to have been ‘left behind.’[25]

On the other hand, two British academics with admitted connections to EU funding (although — as they stated in advance — not for this particular work!) attempted to do exactly this: to use high powered statistical analysis to draw conclusions consistent with the Bremain propaganda. That is, the black propaganda that those who voted Brexit did so mainly because of their anti-immigrant or racist feelings rather than because they were angry with the phasing out of their country’s economic and national sovereignty within the EU and the fact that their economic position had significantly deteriorated since the opening and liberalization of markets for capital, commodities and labor imposed by Thatcherism first and then by the Maastricht Treaty and the other EU treaties that followed.

Thus, according to this supposedly ‘objective’ scientific research, those who voted for Brexit did so simply because they were ignorant anti-immigrant (the implicitly insinuation is that they were racists) who in fact live in areas where immigration is low and therefore were hardly in a position to judge whether immigration is good or bad! The two academics, starting with the clearly biased premise that “the EU referendum was, for many people, a referendum on immigration”, made a major ‘discovery’ based on supposedly “hard evidence”. Their ‘discovery’ was that “in most cases, high proportions of Leave voters were not concentrated in areas of high immigration. Apart from a few outliers, the districts with the highest vote for Leave were those with the lowest levels of immigration.”[26] However, you do not need any sort of statistical analysis but just common sense to realize that immigrants do not have any economic or other incentive to move to deprived areas populated mostly by the victims of globalization and, instead, they tend to concentrate in areas where the beneficiaries of globalization also live, such as London, although, inevitably, many of the victims of globalization also live in such big urban areas and inner London areas. But, at this point, this ‘objective’ analysis makes another heroic jump to ‘justify’ the biased premise it started with. Relying on the conclusions of the well-known systemic think-tank Demos (presumably based on a similar kind of ‘research’) according to which “contact with migrants and members of ethnic minority communities ‘takes the edge off negative perceptions’, something reinforced by assimilation,” they drew, hey presto, the pre-conceived conclusion they wanted to ‘prove’:

“So, where migrants were not present, it appears they were held partly to blame for the all-too-real, but much deeper-seated, economic difficulties experienced by locals.” [27]

Clearly, this is just another distortion of the voting behavior of the victims of globalization. The “economic difficulties experienced by locals” that the research mentions refer, mainly, to the squeezing of wages as a result of immigration. Τhe obvious inference is that the absence of such a serious squeeze in an area should be taken to mean that, if Brexit was victorious in it, the locals should have been motivated by anti-immigration feelings.

However, the victims of globalization voted for Brexit not just because they suffered a squeezing in their wages during the globalization era but, even more important, because of the general deprivation in their areas, as a result of the closing down of entire industries following the move of the TNCs to the ‘labor paradises’ of the Far East. Furthermore, they voted for Brexit because of the decaying of the social welfare system, which of course has been directly due to the drastic cut in social spending in the globalization era, as a result of the adoption of tax cutting neoliberal policies. Obviously, the mass influx of immigrants, on top of the cuts in social spending, had surely made the situation worse.

In other words, the real motives of those who voted for Brexit cannot be found on the basis of empirical research, as this sort of analysis idiotically implies, but only on the basis of historical analysis. Thus, the fact that before globalization there were no serious anti-immigrant or Islamophobic trends in Europe is far from accidental. Common sense makes crystal clear that the effects of globalization I mentioned above, as well as those of the mass Islamophobic campaign —supposedly aimed against terrorism but, in fact, aimed to cover up the crimes of the Transnational and Zionist elites in the Middle East during the globalization era — are highly related to the present outburst of anti-immigrant and Islamophobic trends.

Similarly, the Trump victory in the USA simply confirmed the fact, recognized also even by systemic writers, that the movement for Brexit in Britain, as well as the movement for Trump in the United States and similar movements all over Europe, are in fact all parts of a rising new anti-globalization movement which began in Europe and has spread all over the world. As I tried to show in my latest book with respect to Brexit, globalization is a class issue, and Brexit reflected the popular reaction to the class nature of globalization. Furthermore, it was exactly the abysmal failure of the ‘Left’ in the UK and US to grasp this fact (either for dogmatic reasons or because it has already been fully integrated in the NWO) which has led to its theoretical and consequently political bankruptcy. Therefore, the Trump victory in the USA simply confirmed the fact, recognized also even by systemic writers, that the movement for Brexit in Britain, as well as the movement for Trump in the United States and similar movements all over Europe, are all parts of a rising new anti-globalization movement which began in Europe and has spread all over the world.

Yet both the globalists in the US (i.e. the Democrats as well as the globalist ‘Left’) and those in the UK did not have any qualms about playing the racist card, in their desperate effort to root out ‘Trumpism’ and Brexit respectively. The pretext in the US was Trump’s senseless promise to build a wall around America and particularly on the border with Mexico to stop mass illegal immigration from that country. On this, he was conveniently ‘forgetting’ in the process that it was the US elites in the first instance, which, in collaboration with the Mexican elites, created the present dependent development of Mexico, whose growth depends on foreign (i.e. US) investment and trade, as these elites destroyed any possibility of economic self-reliance in that country. Of course, Mexico’s dependent development goes back to the history of its relation to the USA in the last century and NAFTA, (the agreement between the local and US elites) simply institutionalized this dependence relationship (exactly as the EU agreement institutionalized Greek dependence on Northern Europe).

Towards a Democratic world Community of Sovereign Nations

As Prof. John McMurtry aptly described the causes underlying the rise of the present anti-globalization movement:

“An underlying revolution in thinking has occurred. Trump has tapped the deep chords of worker rage at dispossession by forced corporate globalization, criminally disastrous Middle East wars, and trillions of dollars of bailouts to Wall Street. He never connects the dots on stage. But by Clinton’s advocacy of all of them, she has made them her own and will go down because of it… But this is not a Republican-Democrat division. It is as deep as all the lost jobs and lives since 2001, and it is ultimately grounded in the tens of millions of dispossessed people which the life-blind global market system and its wars have imposed on America too.”[28]

In fact, It is this realization of dispossession by the victims of globalization in Europe and the USA, as a result of the loss of their economic sovereignty (and for many peoples in Europe of their national sovereignty as well), which has led them to move en masse to the neo-nationalist movements:

from the globalist ‘Left’, which has been fully integrated into the NWO (Socialists, social democrats as well as political crooks of the SYRIZA and Podemos kind) and also

from a myopic anti-systemic Left which, like the millenarians, waits for the socialist revolution, instead of fighting for national and economic sovereignty by breaking the ties with the NWO and its institutions (EU, IMF, WTO and the likes).

No wonder the huge political gap created by the historical Left was quickly filled by neonationalist parties and movements (most of which, however, have nothing to do with old nationalist and racist parties).

In conclusion, only an economic and political union of peoples resisting today’s uni-polar NWO would be in a position to create the pre-conditions for transcending the present homogenization and put, instead, the foundations for a different, really self-managed society —something obviously impossible today when the vast majority of the world population, the victims of globalization, live under conditions of effective occupation fighting for their own survival. This requires a new transition strategy aiming to create the conditions for the development of a democratic world community of sovereign and self-reliant nations to replace the present New World Order of neoliberal globalization. It is also hoped that such a strategy would allow a genuine new form of internationalism to be built ‘from below’, which will be inspired by the principles of solidarity and mutual aid, rather than the catastrophic principles of competitiveness and profit-making, as at present.-